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Now Damien Echols Will Teach You the Secrets of Magick

FancyMancy

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Grace Ahlbom for The New York Times

After almost two decades on death row, this member of the West Memphis Three is touring America, teaching the rituals that set him free.

As a teenager in the mid-1990s, Damien Echols dabbled in Wicca and wrote love spells in his journal. When three 8-year-old boys — Stevie Branch, Michael Moore and Christopher Beyers — were found dead in the woods in West Memphis, Ark., police immediately focused their investigation on Mr. Echols and his friends Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, Jr. They were pentagram-doodling, Metallica-listening nonconformists in their Bible Belt community, and they were charged despite the lack of any physical evidence tying them to the crime scene and a dozen witnesses placing them elsewhere.

During the murder trial, prosecutors painted Mr. Echols as the ringleader of a satanic group that had murdered the boys in an occult ritual. Mr. Echols, who seems congenitally unable to be anyone other than himself, didn’t do himself any favors on the stand. When the prosecutor asked if he read books by Aleister Crowley, “a noted author in the field of satanic worship,” Mr. Echols said no, then added, “I would have read them if I saw them.” In 1996, he was found guilty of the boys’ murders and sent to Death Row. Mr. Baldwin and Mr. Misskelley both received life sentences.

Thanks to three HBO documentaries about the case, the convicted men became known as the West Memphis Three, and their cause found supporters throughout the country, including a number of high-profile celebrities such as Johnny Depp and Eddie Vedder.

Mr. Echols had dropped out of school in the ninth grade, but he used prison as a kind of monastic retreat and an opportunity for self-directed study. He read about the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the 19th-century occult group that counted Crowley, W.B. Yeats, Bram Stoker and Arthur Conan Doyle as members. He began practicing the Golden Dawn’s highly choreographed rituals, tracing pentagrams in the air while invoking the names of angels. The Wicca of his youth soon seemed goofy and uninformed.

At first, he questioned whether his rituals were just him playing games with his own mind. “Is this really happening or is this just like my imaginary friend? But what else did I have to do all day?” he asked. And then one day in his prison cell he saw an angel. It didn’t have wings or a flowing robe; in fact, it looked like two large black triangles that somehow exuded a kind of intelligence. “I understood why biblical angels always say right off, ‘Be not afraid,’” he said. “And I never questioned it again.”

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Johnny Depp and Mr. Echols in 2017. Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times

His studies grew more intense as his life on Death Row became increasingly restricted. In 2003, Arkansas moved its Death Row inmates to a new supermax unit. Supermax prisons were mostly built in the 1990s as punitive custody for disruptive prisoners, and touted by tough-on-crime politicians as a place to sequester the worst of the worst. Inmates were kept in sealed rooms for 23 hours a day.

Some states found their supermax prisons underpopulated — there weren’t enough of the worst bad guys, apparently — while at the same time there were bed shortages in mainstream prisons, so they relocated other prisoners to the supermax units. Until 2003, Mr. Echols and his fellow Death Row inmates had been housed in cells with barred doors, which meant that they could see and talk to one another. “They were able to have relationships. They would pass books back and forth,” Mr. Echols’s wife, Lorri Davis, told me. “The supermax sealed them up in tombs.”

Rituals helped keep Mr. Echols’s mind and senses alive. “By the last two years, it was all I did. I slept very little,” he told me. “I would just eat and work out and do magick.” That terminal “k” is there to distinguish Mr. Echols’s practices — part of an occult spiritual tradition that incorporates Gnostic Christianity, Taoist energy practices and esoteric Judaism — from the cheesy pull-the-rabbit-out-of-a-hat illusion work that most people associate with the word magic.

He developed his own rituals, spending hours summoning sense memories of the seasons until the gray world of the prison faded away. Every day, he and Ms. Davis “would dredge up as much energy as we could and program it with the intent of getting me out,” Mr. Echols said. “Eventually I stopped thinking about the goal, and it became about the joy of doing it.” Ms. Davis noticed the effect it had on him. “Even the way he carried himself started to change,” she told me. “He got his confidence back. He absolutely came alive.”

After new DNA evidence further supported the West Memphis Three’s innocence, the men were offered a surprise plea deal in 2011. (The terms of the deal meant that although they would still be technically found guilty of the crime, they were allowed to maintain their innocence.) Mr. Echols and Ms. Davis saw this as evidence that their rituals had worked. After 18 years and 78 days on Death Row, Mr. Echols was released from prison and immediately headed to a giant party thrown by Mr. Vedder, one of his most steadfast celebrity supporters. There were hors d’oeuvres, an open bar and a giddy sense of victory.

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“I’m 43 years old and for the first time in my life, I’m actually happy,” Mr. Echols said. Grace Ahlbom for The New York Time

Being released from prison turned out to be nearly as traumatic as being sent there in the first place. “I was shattered, broke, devastated,” he said. He said he thought he would be wrecked forever. He had a hard time reading maps and recognizing faces. If he tried to watch a movie, he’d fall asleep within the first five minutes, as if his overstimulated brain were powering itself down. Although he’d read four books a week in prison, now he found himself unable to focus enough to get through a paragraph. Prison had aged him rapidly: Even though he was only in his late 30s, his short-term memory was shot, his eyesight had degenerated and he suffered from arthritis. He was terrified to be alone, so Ms. Davis rearranged her schedule so they were basically never apart. While in prison, he’d grown confident in his ability to shape reality; now he couldn’t do magick for more than a few seconds. “You know like in ‘The Secret’ where people try to manifest a parking spot? Something that insignificant was all that I could do,” he said.

The terms of the plea deal meant that the West Memphis Three weren’t eligible for wrongful conviction compensation. To earn money, he and Ms. Davis went on tour, promoting books and documentaries about the case, despite Mr. Echols’s precarious physical and psychological state. (His memoir “Life After Death” was a New York Times best-seller; he and Ms. Davis are the co-authors of “Yours for Eternity: A Love Story on Death Row,” a volume of their prison love letters, and the co-producers of “West of Memphis,” a documentary about the case directed by Amy Berg.) The tours were grueling.

Mr. Echols wanted to focus on the future, but his public persona revolved around the worst period of his life. “Everyone thinks that time is so interesting,” he said. “To me, it’s just boring.”

Over the next several years, Mr. Echols slowly developed a community based around magick. He also became confident enough to explore the city on his own. New York City turned out to be a magic(k)al place. He found many locations and objects that felt charged with powerful energy: the Egyptian altar at the Met; St. John the Divine. He loved visiting Cleopatra’s Needle in Central Park. “Priests have been putting divine energy into it for centuries,” he said. It was difficult to sustain an extended ritual practice in the small Harlem apartment he and Ms. Davis shared with their three attention-hungry cats — Baby, Spider Jenkins and Goswyn — but he managed.

Mr. Echols recently came to Brooklyn, where, dressed entirely in black and with arcane symbols tattooed on most of his visible skin, he spoke before a rapt crowd at the Brooklyn Bowl. The day before, he’d done seven and a half hours of magick, the most since he’d been out of prison.

“I’m 43 years old and for the first time in my life, I’m actually happy,” he said. Mr. Echols’s teaching style is at once esoteric and earthy. He seems just as happy talking about quantum physics and ancient Mesopotamian gods as he is riffing on “The Karate Kid.”

“We’re feeding all our energy to Instagram and Facebook and TV shows,” Mr. Echols told the group. “This energy is vital. And the point of these practices is to turn that energy back inward, to feed our spiritual growth.”

“The point is not enlightenment,” he said. “What most people think of as enlightenment is a side effect of magick.”

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At Brooklyn Bowl. Grace Ahlbom for The New York Times

Whether fans who loved him as a Death Row martyr will take to him as a spiritual leader is not yet clear. “I’ve followed Damien for a few years. The documentaries really inspired me,” said Elaine Castillo, who drove six hours from Rochester to attend the class with her husband. “I don’t know much about high magick, but I want to have an open mind.”

Outside afterward, a cluster of fans waited for Mr. Echols. Nearly everyone was dressed in black — “school colors,” someone joked — and several had tattoos of esoteric symbols drawn by Mr. Echols. One of them, Kimberly Bichko, told me that she had seen Mr. Echols perform a guardian angel ritual at a gallery last winter. “I thought that if this man could go through the hell he endured, maybe I would be able to put my own hell behind me,” she said. Performing the ritual every day helped her with her PTSD. Another fan credited Mr. Echols with helping him stay sober.

Mr. Echols was gracious and jokey with his fans, but the social interaction seemed to drain him. Afterward at dinner with friends, he seemed agitated and unfocused. He tried to explain how his immersion in magick was making it increasingly difficult to engage with the mundane realities of day-to-day life, including dinner party chitchat. His memory issues meant that an hour from now, he might not remember a word of this conversation. By tomorrow, he probably wouldn’t remember that it had happened at all. “I live completely in the present moment,” he said, with some urgency. Ms. Davis watched him closely. “Does it seem terrible, the way I am?” he asked, more than once. “Because it’s not.”

His book of rituals, “High Magick: A Guide to the Spiritual Practices That Saved My Life on Death Row,” arrives on Oct. 30. He will embark on what promises to be a bigger challenge: A national tour , teaching introductory magick classes in half a dozen American cities.

A few days later, Mr. Echols and I visited the Cloisters, one of his favorite magickal sites. He seemed to have regained his equilibrium. We wandered among the tapestries and discussed Instagram witches. “It’s for the better,” he said. “If you talk about witches now and people think about Instagram, not Satanism, that lowers the danger level. At least it is not going to happen to anyone else.”

In a room full of funereal figures, Mr. Echols paused to contemplate a wooden figure of a saint, and I waited for him to say something profound. “That guy’s head looks like a Milk Dud,” he drawled eventually. This is Mr. Echols’s other mode, prankish and fond of dumb jokes. “The two things that bring me joy are magick and things that make me laugh,” he said. “I want to just let everything else go.”

That’s easier said than done, since the things he wants to let go of are also what brought him here. Without prison, he said, “I would’ve lived the life my parents did — dead end jobs, horrible health, not happy in their lives. Even when I was a kid I always thought, there’s got to be more than this. But that was the world I knew.”

We stood in front of a glass case with a gaudy gold vessel inside. Mr. Echols identified it as a monstrance, a vessel for displaying the Eucharist during Catholic mass. He noted that the word had the same Latin root as “monster”: monstrum, “to shine forth,” he defined helpfully. The terrible and wonderful, all bound up together. “If you’ve seen a monster, even if it’s horrible,” he said, “that’s evidence of divinity.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/style/damien-echols.html

(Yes, it is a terrible and horrible shame that he went through shit when he shouldn't have, but he ignores Astrogy and his Natal chart...) Aww. What a good goy, thinking his life is not terrible, having been in jail on death row for ages after being accused wrongly despite evidence to the contrary, and with ill health; thinking arthritis, anxiety/depression, and whatever else is good health, with which he became institutionalised during; and thinking judeochristian "angel 'high' magic" is safe and helpful (with the long and drawn-out amount of work needed for it), and that wicca is both Satanic and silly childish things, and that Satanism is evil, while saying monsters are divine and lovely. My. What a good, demented goy.

Who wonders if this was in the making for anti-Spiritual Satanism in dese 'ear end taams? Maybe a precursor to a larger 'movement'. Maybe it will come out that he has a big-arsed Swastika flag on his wall.

Oh, the parallels with being a fundy xian. Rags-to-Riches, muh jeebus. You can see clearly that this anti-Human; anti-Natural; anti-Spiritual; anti-Scientific shambles of a system is basic xianity and jew-faecated.
 
He got deep into wicca which is a kabala practice that mixes energies and got tied into this enemy energy and then met with the misfortune of being arrested and convicted on no evidence and put on death row. Then he had to work around the clock for almost twenty years to get released. But with no ability to obtain money from the state. However this shows he mentions internal Taoist energy practices that a person if they even have a basic practice can pour enough energy into something and manifest it to some level.

Note the angel is revealing its obviously a thoughform. Getting into enemy magic systems ruined this guys life and health a stint like that takes decades off a persons life. A lot of people meet with disaster for getting into enemy systems. They are also full of curses on the non Chosen for using them. As we can note here.
 
This story has always bothered me and it doesn't have a happy ending in sight. It reminds of those horror/thriller movies where the victim seems to finally have an escape from an impossible to beat monster/villain. They are in a dark street running and they get picked up by them in a car or they run up to a well lit house to find the villains or their cohorts. At this point they are completely worn out empty shells and succumb to the monster totally.

I'm just glad for some of us there is a better way. I have come close to getting wrapped up in enemy magic and I'm just glad I never got sucked into it. For whatever reason I could not get into workings that involved summoning angelic beings in my house. Part of why I found Jos was I was looking for non jewish magic specifically as well as info on the kundalini. It was hard to find much reliable info from the books I had read.

I've always wanted to find the truth to everything no matter how uncomfortable it might be. Satan = truth, it all makes perfect sense.

HP Mageson666 said:
He got deep into wicca which is a kabala practice that mixes energies and got tied into this enemy energy and then met with the misfortune of being arrested and convicted on no evidence and put on death row. Then he had to work around the clock for almost twenty years to get released. But with no ability to obtain money from the state. However this shows he mentions internal Taoist energy practices that a person if they even have a basic practice can pour enough energy into something and manifest it to some level.

Note the angel is revealing its obviously a thoughform. Getting into enemy magic systems ruined this guys life and health a stint like that takes decades off a persons life. A lot of people meet with disaster for getting into enemy systems. They are also full of curses on the non Chosen for using them. As we can note here.
 
The situation is 12 other people placed them somewhere else during the killings and the actual forensic evidence found them innocent. This also might be another case of Satanic Panic nonsense. And this is a Xian fundamentalist area as well. The fact this guy was called a Satanist for practicing Gold Dawn which is a Judeo Christian occult system is typically dumb. This guy was praying to jesus and angels.
 

Al Jilwah: Chapter IV

"It is my desire that all my followers unite in a bond of unity, lest those who are without prevail against them." - Satan

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